situation is greatly changed. But even now, both in England and in America, big business on the
whole dislikes war.
Enlightened self-interest is, of course, not the loftiest of motives, but those who decry it often
substitute, by accident or design, motives which are much worse, such as hatred, envy, and love of
power. On the whole, the school which owed its origin to Locke, and which preached enlightened
self-interest, did more to increase human happiness, and less to increase human misery, than was
done by the schools which despised it in the name of heroism and self-sacrifice. I do not forget the
horrors of early industrialism, but these, after all, were mitigated within the system. And I set
against them Russian serfdom, the evils of war and its aftermath of fear and hatred, and the
inevitable obscurantism of those who attempt to preserve ancient systems when they have lost
their vitality.
CHAPTER XVI BerkeleyGORGE BERKELEY ( 1685-1753) is important in philosophy through his denial of the existence
of matter--a denial which he supported by a number of ingenious arguments. He maintained that
material objects only exist through being perceived. To the objection that, in that case, a tree, for
instance, would cease to exist if no one was looking at it, he replied that God always perceives
everything; if there were no God, what we take to be material objects would have a jerky life,
suddenly leaping into being when we look at them; but as it is, owing to God's perceptions, trees
and rocks and stones have an existence as continuous as common sense supposes. This is, in his
opinion, a weighty argument for the existence of God. A limerick by Ronald Knox, with a reply,
sets forth Berkeley's theory of material objects: